Building PHP for extension development

In a typical PHP installation, the need for high performance almost always
results in optimization at the cost of debugging facilities. This is a
reasonable tradeoff for production use, but when developing an extension it
falls short. What we need is a build of PHP which will give us some hints
what has gone wrong when something does.

The Zend Engine provides a memory manager which is capable of tracking
memory leaks in extensions and providing detailed debugging information.
This tracking is disabled by default, as is thread-safety. To turn them
on, pass the --enable-debug
and
--enable-maintainer-zts options to
configure, along with whatever options you typically
use. For instructions on building PHP from source, see the instructions at
Ogólnie o instalacji. A typical configure
line might look like this: